Abstract
This study examines the roles of cultural change, social status, and natural resources in influencing both the siting and occupance of prehistoric (10th-12th century) pit house and pueblo dwellings in the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area (CRAA) in south-western Colorado. The study first demonstrates a prominent bimodal clustering of riverine pit house and mesa-top pueblo settlements, and then presents a number of hypotheses to account for the eleventh century pit house to pueblo transition which resulted in these disparate dwelling distributions. It is concluded that: indigenous social factors (population growth and craft specialization) initiated the housing transition; on-going population increase and the arrival of colonists from nearby Chaco Canyon by the mid-eleventh century perpetuated the building of upland dwellings; and the thin soil layer of the mesa top restricted construction to only surface pueblos, which contrasted spatially with the older pit houses of the lower alluvial plain.
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